A distributed systems architecture for the 1990’s

Butler Lampson, Michael Schroeder, and Andrew Birrell

 

Citation: Digital Systems Research Center, December 1989.

Links: Abstract, Acrobat. Here is an HTML version created by OCR for the benefit of search engines; it is not meant for human consumption.

Email: blampson@microsoft.com. This paper is at http://research.microsoft.com.

 

Abstract:

Most markets for computing are evolving towards distributed solutions. The system framework that accommodates distributed solutions most gracefully is likely to dominate in the 1990’s. A leadership distributed system includes the best of today’s centralized systems, combining their coherence and function with the better cost/performance, growth, scale, geographic extent, availability, and reliability possible in distributed systems. To build such a system requires a distributed systems architecture as the framework for a wide variety of products. The architecture specifies a set of standard services in a distributed system. Together these services make up an integrated system with global names, access, availability, security, and management, all working uniformly throughout the system. 

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